How-to: Add Visual Studio Command Prompt To Visual Studio

As you know my daily work is highly depending on Visual Studio Team Foundation Services, so when last week VS 2017 was released, I immediately installed it and continued my work as before. It's one of those great things of VS: a high up- and downward compatibility. It makes me smile.

Nevertheless there are always a couple of things that I need to reinstall to have my setup the way I want it. Among them:

• Make Araxis the default compare tool. You might recall of wrote a small post on this, primarily to remind myself.
• Add Diff All Files plug-in. Great tool, waiting eagerly for the 2017 version. But deadlydog is a fast one to get it updated.
• Add the VS Command Prompt, the topic of this post. Also a reminder for myself.

Add VS Command Prompt

For this I lately used Steve Fenton's post Add Visual Studio Command Prompt To Visual Studio 2015. Straight forward to implement. However for 2017 it needs some tweaking with respect to the argument:

1. Open VS 2017
2. Go to Tools > External Tools…
3. Click Add and enter the following information into the new tool screen
   

   Field	Value
   Title	VS Command Prompt
   Command:	C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
   Arguments:	/k “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat”
   Initial Directory:	$(SolutionDir)

4. Save your changes (and re-order your tools to suit your preferences).

The VS Command Prompt will now be available in: Tools > VS Command Prompt